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Like me, Ben Carson didn't have wealth growing up, according to best-selling memoirs and motivational books, but he did have the most valuable resource: a stable, supportive and encouraging home life provided by parents and other elders who were willing to sacrifice for the sake of our upbringing. I understand why he wants other families to have those advantages.

But what do you do for the poor kids in families that don't have even those basic resources? Carson in his first interview offered three major steps of self-help that could lift almost all of the nation's poor out of poverty: Finish high school, get married and delay childbirth until after marriage.

Fine. But as Donald Trump's campaign illustrated, social and economic turbulence has left millions of working-class people of all races adrift in job loss, marriage breakups, income inequality and drug addictions.

Those troubled households need more than pep talks. Seasoned veterans of housing and poverty issues point out that poverty hits different people in different ways that call for different remedies.

Robert Woodson, a black conservative like Carson and president of the Woodson Center (former the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise) in Washington, outlined in a telephone interview the "four different types of poor people" he has encountered in more than 2,000 community organizations that the center has assisted with technical and organizational help.

At one end are those who are "poor because they're just broke," he said. They include a lot of hardworking people whose jobs moved away or who were hit by some other calamity. "They turn to government support temporarily," said Woodson, "as an ambulance service, not as a transportation system."

At the other end are the people about whom Ben Carson was talking, "a group that is poor because of the chances that they take and the choices that they make," Woodson said. "This is the group we work with the most."

This group requires more elaborate services, ideally run by neighborhood-based organizations enlisting volunteers from the local community. It may sound far-fetched, but I've been out with Woodson on site visits and been amazed at how tirelessly and how well local residents take charge of community improvement, assisted by public-private partnerships, to produce remedies that work.

That's what makes the new administration's proposed cuts to the HUD budget troubling. They're asking for cuts before taking a thorough look at what they're cutting. We may not know everything about what causes poverty, but when you build programs that work to fight poverty, you should try to build more of them.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)

(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.